? If you click on "*All" at the bottom of the object window with no filter then there is no prompt or anything asking "Are you sure you want to load EVERY SINGLE OBJECT IN THE GAME ?".
? CTRL+F, the Replace Object window, it takes ages to load.
?Opening quest aliases. As if making quests wasn't annoying already there has to be that cherry on top making the alias windows take ages to open up.
?Among other things I'm just forgetting.

If you look at bethesda's Creation Kit tutorials there you can see that the Replace Object window appears instantly for them. I also tried putting my skyrim folder on an SSD. It does feels like the loading times aren't as slow but they are still very slow.

So if the replace object window appears instantly for bethesda and not for me using the PC i am using(specs below) + an ssd ?
And is it so hard to just put a little prompt window asking if you want to continue when you forget to put something in the filter when you have the *All section selected in the object window?
And what is taking so long when opening quest aliases ? To be honest, it's ridiculous.


Whoops, forgot my specs:

CPU: Intel i7 2600 3.4Ghz
RAM: 8GB DDR3 HyperX RAM
GPU: ATI Radeon HD5870-1GB
HDD: 125GB SSD
KeyBoard: Razer Blackwidow
Mouse: Razer DeathAdder
Headset: Steelseries Siberia v2(white)

Bad programming?
Bad framework?
Bad optimization?

Plenty of reasons why, takes about 15 seconds to load every object without a filter for me (I'm running @ 4.4GHz + 2GHz memory). SSD won't help because when you load because those items are already loaded into memory when you loaded Skyrim.esm, it's all on your processor and your memory thereafter.

It just has a huge amount of stuff to load. It doesn't help if you have a slower computer. The kit takes a lot more resources than the actual game.

It wasn't made for modders, it's a byproduct of a tool made for creators.

A lot of crap gets loaded when it doesn't need to...

Oh, you need to open this dialog that references an object without a filter? HERE YA GO, 10 BILLION ITEMS IN THE DROPDOWN MENU YOUR NOT EVEN GOING TO CLICK ON.

RAM is the answer folks. The CK eats it for breakfast, lunch and supper.
I don't have any problem, but I'm running with 12GB and a SATA600 SSD.
Even then, I still managed to crash the CK when generating LOD for the whole of Tamriel worldspace. Once the free memory got to just under 700MB,...BANG,...the CK blew a fuse.

Actually, a SSD does help. As well as loading in the Skyrim.esm, the CK also has to access the Meshes.bsa, Textures.bsa and Misc.bsa. Probably a few others as well. That's another 3GB of compressed files it has to look through. It doesn't store these in memory.
It also doesn't free up memory after you exit the program, so I normally reboot Windows after a long session working with the CK.

A word of advice or, rather, quite a few words: I think it would be far far better for you if you put some letters, a tag or or a word in the filter in the object window before selecting the All node in the Object Window - or you could be waiting a rather long time. The game area might only cover a few hundred square kilometers, but there is one hell of a lot of detail even in tiny worlds like Skyrim's "Tamriel".
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Of course, if you do inadvertently select the All node without a filter, it is more than likely time for you to get up and treat yourself to a proper meal or an espresso or, perhaps, go get 7-9 hours of sleep depending on how stressed you're feeling and whether it is that time of day. Yes, there's lots of stuff you're never going to use - but if the things shown under the All node were culled for "efficiency", then many of the things you might take for granted, you'd never get to use. After all, what is useless to one person is useful to another because different people like to do different things.

Last I heard was that SSDs are still bottlenecked to USB speeds (even though some deceptively sport a SATA II interface).
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[EDIT]I'm fishing for some good news here. Some of the vendors where I come from have been burned when trying to deal with SSDs because what gets imported in this country is substandard anyway. Let's just say that the importers have deep enough pockets to defend themselves against anything the local regulators could throw at them - and leave it at that. We all know how the rest of the story goes. This is very frustrating if you're looking for half decent tech - so if you are getting good transfer speeds from your SSD, I'd be really curious to hear about it.[/EDIT]

Yeah I find some of the 'It isn't tailored to exactly my needs' attitude in this thread to be quite shocking... The Creation Kit is a toolket for developing an entire game. It has all the parts needed. (Other than 3rd party modelling, etc) So, unless you're making an entire time, chances are there are going to be parts of it that you never use. Every indevidual part for a certain purpose is made that way for a reason. I find damn near every part of the CK that I use on a daily basis to be very well thought out and implemented. They make things the way they are for a reason. What may set one person back mildly, helps another person immensely.

Do you really think a full-title AAA game company would make their tools worse on purpose?

The drives are only as fast as the device they are connected to. You won't get SATA III speeds if you connect it to a SATA I or SATA II port (obviously).
I've got 2 SSDs (256GB and 64Gb) and when copying from one to the other, the speeds are over 350MB/s. My board only has SATA II ports, so I had to buy a SATA III card to make full use of the drives maximum speed.
The speed also depends on the type and size of files your reading/writing. A lot of small files will copy slower than 1 large file, but the main difference is in read speed because the access time is so low.

Anyway, back on topic. I wouldn't click the All option unless I had something in the filter window. I'm trying to learn were most of the items are grouped and just click through the different groups.

The time it takes to load the Quest Alias window bugs me the most ...
I can see it eating up the whole processor for several seconds each time.
I don't even know WHAT IT COULD BE DOING???

Especially annoying when all I want to do is change a single setting, like the "Quest Object" flag ...

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Why bother in the first place if you can simply neglect to release the SDK or tool-kit? I think SkyCk is very much the same tool used by Bethesda The most likely difference may be that Bethesda's personnel have the correct operating procedures, whereas we have only the barest documentation. Lack of reviewable working procedures can really slow things down (and is well known to cause accidents, injuries and fatalities in other industries in addition to lost profits).
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In terms of people deliberately stuffing things up, what used to happen back in the 1970s and 1980s is that individuals would occasionally sabotage software projects. Whether this was due to becoming disgruntled, sleep deprivation related insanity, stress-related insanity, or just the right offer from a rival company, who is to know. Yet any half-decent project manager would know straight away that there was something fishy in the works because accidental bugs are always very simple - even when they are very difficult to find. However, bugs resulting from sabotage tend to be complex, prone to mimic one-another and interact with one-another - so that bug fixes only ever make things worse unless they hit all the bugs at once. The tell to look for is uncommented source if you get lucky and the saboteur is an imbecile. When serious, it will be commented to look just like the rest of the source code except the comments will say nothing that makes any sense and just sounds good but won't actually describe what the attached code does. Does this kind of thing still happen today? I see no evidence that our culture has evolved sufficiently to make such things less likely. So things like this can never be overlooked. But companies who might be inclined to take the time to dumb down an SDK so it doesn't do too much? I reckon they'd not release an SDK in the first place if that was on the agenda.

I've recommended doing this in the past. It's a good idea too. And it's likely the CK will crash on a full all with an empty field >_>.

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The kind of junk I hear the local importers have tried to push in Australia had the SATA II fittings but between the drive memory and the SATA II interface was a USB controller which kind of limited things - no where near the 3 Gb/Sec speeds you can get from a mechanical drive on a real SATA II connection. So, for the big backups, I'm still stuffing around with mechanical drives.
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Back on topic, I find that we tend to remember seeing the objects we want to use somewhere in the game. And so, in my case, I re-enter the game to find where I last saw the object and what the place was called. I'm not bad at remembering terrain features but words are not nearly so memorable for me. From here, I return to the game and hunt down the item in the interior cell in SkyCK. For the sake of clean modding, I restart SkyCK without saving once I've got the name of the object or objects I want written down and then I have something to stick in the filter. However, just doing a blind inspection of objects in each category can be rather illuminating - and very time consuming.

18 seconds on my rig. That's not so bad and the Object Window's "All" can be avoided easily enough...

X48BT2
QX9770 @ 3.8GHz
8GB DDR3 1600MHz
Crucial C300 SSD <-- Definitely makes difference

If that is the case you would get about 7MB/s throughput, assuming USB 2.0.


My guess would be bad algorithms and/or data-structures.

But what RealmEleven suggested is a good idea, indeed.

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That's about the size (or rate) of what I hear from the local vendors. If people overseas are getting upwards of 350 mB/sec SSD throughput it means that some of the SSDs are the real deal - which is good news. Back in the nineties, I handled some Japanese proprietary solid state gear and it was impressively durable. Maybe maybe it would serve me well to acquaint myself with a reputable hardware vender in the E.U. and start importing my own gear when next I'm on the hunt for parts...

It's pointless to point out that you should put things in the filter before selecting all, everybody still selects it sometimes. There's no excuse when you say that it's just bad design/programming.

I still can't imagine what could be taking so long when opening for example: quest aliases or Object Replacement window.

They should honestly just make the "selecting all" job get thrown to a background thread, and just cancel it if user selects another option while it is loading the assets (and just show a nice loading status rather than freeze up the entire ck)

Not an excuse rather a possible explanation of what might be use of unfit algorithms and data-structures -- this can make huge differences.

They should do a lot of work in background threads or a thread-pool, but they didn't. Most likely not because that's a lot harder to get right and correctness has to trump any performance considerations.

I guess when BGS started out they didn't think of performance as a feature.

Well back then it was harder to create multithreaded/asynchronous applications -- there weren't any libraries.
Now there are a few solid ones; Microsoft went ahead and build http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd504870.aspx (and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd492418.aspx) then Intel followed up and build http://threadingbuildingblocks.org/ on top of it. However, this shipped with VS2010, much to late to build on it for BGS.

Yeah, takes me 35 seconds, but I don't have the best rig. Also, clicking that is indeed very easily avoided. Especially once you learn where in the heirarchy things area. I click it without a filter on accident maybe... once a week. And even 35 seconds on a slower computer isn't bad considering it's loading a detailed list of like 600,000 objects.

Athlon X2 235e @ 2.7GHz
6GB DDR2
750GB HDD

There's no way Bethesda generated their LOD with the CK...

Anyway, if they used the exact same thing, why would it take them so long to release it? I don't really think it took 3 months just for the steam workshop thing, and they could have just released an update for that anyway.

Edit, about the topic:
3 seconds to load program
24 seconds to load Skyrim.esm including "Yes to all" dialogue
13 seconds for the *All list to open

CPU: Q9550 3.7 Ghz
Ram: 4GB
SSD: Mushkin Chronos 120GB

I've also never selected *All by accident.

What's most interesting to me is...
Loading Skyrim.esm with TESSnip takes only 16 seconds, and saving files with TESSnip is at least 5 times faster than the Creation kit, but files saved with TESSnip are about 3 times larger.

http://zlib.net/ = "Compressed" flag. TESVSnip edited plugins are left with that flag unchecked for, at least, all CELL records. That, I'd imagine, would account for the added mass.

*16 seconds: Apples and oranges, really. It's looking at the plugin only. No reference info, worrying about assets, etc.

*Skyrim.ESM took 28 seconds to load w/ CK

They have explicitely stated repeatedly, mainly in the last broadcast, that the workshop is exactly what took them so long.

And Joel has stated here on the forums that yes, the CK is the same program they used - the only differences are the lack of their version control system (hence the bugs that exist in esp's but not esm's), the lack of third-party programs which they had no right to release to us, and the presence of the Steam Workshop functionality.

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Let me warn you about something before we start discussing LOD. My experiences generating LOD haven't exactly been encouraging. In Oblivion, it worked randomly and tended to clash with LOD work in other plug-ins (e.g. Just run Elswyr and Valenwood together and see what happens at the border). In Fallout: New Vegas, it could take up to a fortnight or more of continuous running to generate full-scale world LOD and, I'm sorry, but where I come from the power quality isn't sufficient to keep your computer running continuously for that long. So, now I tuck things away below ridge-lines and try to avoid doing anything that will definitely require altering the existing LOD. As you might have guessed, I am not familiar with the current problems of LOD generation. I simply assumed that Bethesda haven't had time to make it run properly on regular PCs.
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When you run a sizable company servicing a profitable niche (and the directors aren't robbing you blind), you can afford to have a couple of big diesel generators, with an electrician to keep them running and give you seven days notice of any minor power fluctuations. Assemble a faraday cage directly into the building structure and, provided you cut yourself off from the power grid, you won't even have to stop for electrical storms (although it may be advisable to cut internet connections at such times). I haven't even gotten to the part where you can get someone to trick up a fast system by making some hardware alterations and trashing a few warranties in the process. The beauty of SSD technology is it need not be bottle-necked at three disk-writers servicing three platters. With the right architecture it can be so much faster.
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And so, Bethesda could conceivably make the Creation Kit components based on the kind of high performance systems that cannot be bought off the shelf. And, when the time comes to release an SDK, it gets bundled up into a unified IDE et voila! Some of it works as expected, some of it won't work at all because it makes assumptions based on that special high speed architecture, and some of it requires specific procedures to be followed - only no-one's going to expect the general public to have any interest in reviewing a procedural library that would dwarf the Encyclopaedia Britannica and is more than likely written for the non-integrated development environment that preceded the development of the IDE we see now.
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However, I can well imagine particularly persistent bugs being dealt with by having the programmers working around the clock manually cleaning up the buggy output instead. I suppose it would be true to say that those programmers don't come bundled with the Creation Kit. Lucky them. If some companies had their way...
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http://www.gamesas.com/user/776788-turn-on-a-dime/ also mentioned third party software which lacked redistribution licensing Tsk, tsk! If you sell to developers, you have to expect and license for: redistribution - anything else is naive, although stronger words may apply. In fact, a lack of redistribution licensing in products sold for profit in the developer market could be argued as cause for lack of merchantability in those products due to the requirements and default expectations of the developer market. Irrespective of any potential trade practice abuses which Bethesda may have fallen victim to, I have to concede that some things, perhaps even the LOD, may well have been generated with the third party software (perhaps because the in-house software isn't quite there yet).
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And now for the bit I haven't got the patience for:
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4 seconds to load the program
10 seconds while I stuff around setting the active file because the Creation Kit can't read my mind. Actually, it is probably closer to 10 minutes because I often leave the office to make myself an espresso as soon as the program starts loading.
37 seconds, thence, to the first warning.
46 seconds from "Yes to all" to plug-in loaded.
2 seconds to load the Tamriel world-space.
28 seconds is how long SkyCk takes to do it's thing if I inadvertently select the All node without a filter - another excuse to go get myself yet another espresso!
5 seconds to close and no synchronization this time.
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Last I checked, I run this on a 64 bit dual core AMD 3.0 GHz Athlon 6000 CPU with 4Gb 800MHz DDRAM, with a video card sporting 1 Gb G-DDR3-256bit vRAM on a Dual Link DVI-I/D-Sub/HDMI channel by Gigabyte 9800GT (nVidia GeForce) model GV-N98TSL-1GI. But the secret ingredient not mentioned in the hardware specs is the little 80Gb dedicated caching disk on its own SATA II channel (and Windows is currently set up to cache only to this disk). That leaves file handling on a separate channel because the operating system and programs have their own 1 tB disk on its own SATA II channel.
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Of course, this can vary drastically, depending on system load. Let's do that again. This time, with the system just a little quieter:
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3 seconds to load the program.
6 seconds of "mouse be nimble, mouse be quick" setting the active file.
27 seconds, thence, to the first warning.
46 seconds from "Yes to all" to plug-in loaded.
2 seconds to load the Tamriel world-space.
29 seconds if I inadvertently-on-purpose click the All node without a filter
4 seconds to close
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Sometimes, Steam can take a few minutes to synchronize. I'm not sure how fast this would go under ideal conditions as I haven't been dedicating as much time to breaking in this instance of Windows. But after all that, I really do need another espresso!